With a government shutdown and all, our friends at the TSA, FAA, USDA and The National Weather Service have still been showing up to work at the Burlington International Airport to keep us all traveling safe and sound. Beginning today, we’ll be supporting these federal workers by offering FREE coffee and 50% off food to all federal employees showing up to work at Burlington International Airport.

As it goes with any business, the costs of doing business are constantly in flux. Prices go up, prices go down. When it comes to food, price fluctuations can be surprisingly large. That’s why, for example, most places have an “MP” next to their Lobster Roll on the menu. While many of us have come to expect the cost of lobster to change significantly from day to day, similar price fluctuations can happen with every single item, every single day. Since it’s become increasingly easier and more efficient to move raw ingredients from coast to coast, many consumers will never even be aware that seasonality and availability will shift the cost of a bag of lettuce, box of oranges or flat of berries from week to week.

For the past several winters, we have had to make a tough choice as it pertains to one of our most popular ingredients: the strawberry. Every year around November, the strawberry crops in Florida and California start to freeze, the supply of berries drops, the quality plummets and the price spikes outrageously.

Up until this year, we’ve tried to find ways to make it all work. We made a modest price increase on our strawberry items year-round in order to continue to provide them at a reasonable margin in the winter. We’ve explored using different local and national distributors. Last year, we even tried to anticipate this annual situation by purchasing as many local strawberries as we could in their short Vermont growing season, processing them into a compote and freezing the compote for this winter spike. We thought the increased locality of the product would win our customers over – unfortunately, the compote was not what our Lovemaker and Strawberry Shortcrepe faithful were expecting or hoping for.

So last week, we had to take a hard look at some serious numbers. 35,749. That’s roughly the number of crepes with strawberries we’ve sold at our brick and mortar locations year to date. To put that in perspective, that’s nearly double the number of Veggie Monsters, our most popular savory crepe, that we sell in an entire year. Wow, we thought, we sell a hell of a lot of strawberries. Meanwhile, the price of strawberries nearly doubled, literally overnight. While we internally deal with the realities of a global food system every day, most of the people that come visit us looking for a crepe probably don’t – so a $20 Lovemaker for the winter months probably wouldn’t be welcome or make much sense to our strawberry loving friends.

And then there’s the other bottom line. While people love strawberries, our earth probably doesn’t. Strawberries annually top the list of the Environmental Watch Fund’s Dirty Dozen – that is to say industrial strawberry cultivation requires the most pesticide treatment of any fruits or vegetables on the market. Sadly, organic strawberries are not entirely immune to pesticide treatment either. Outside of Vermont’s short 4-6 week strawberry growing season, the rest of the year our berries come from monoculture farms in warm weather states, leading to increased carbon emissions associated with transporting product from there to here. While we are deeply committed to sourcing locally, we are also committed to ensuring our food is accessible to folks who are not as obsessed with local food as we are…so we keep ‘gateway foods’ like strawberries and chocolate hazelnut spread in stock all year round. Until now…

Rather than substitute a compote that doesn’t meet everyone’s standards for yum or sell fresh strawberries that do not meet our expectations for environmental, price, or quality standards, we’re pulling them off the menu for now. Yep, that’s right…for the time being, strawberries have been dropped from all our menus. No more Lovemakers, Heartbreakers or Strawberry ShortCrepes. Strawberries will likely find their way back onto our menus once the price and quality of the berry stabilizes, but like we did last year with Nutella, we recognize that we need to find a long-term solution to our less than healthy year-round addiction.

How do you break such a popular (and revenue generating) addiction? For starters, we’ve tried our best to reduce our use of strawberries in weekly specials. Also, for the first time this summer and fall, we began to drop Lovemakers and Heartbreakers at mobile vending events in favor of more sustainable and locally available fruits like apples and blueberries.

Even more boldly, our Skinny Pancakes in Stowe and Sugarbush will be strawberry free when they open this winter. When you consider the 1,200 Lovemakers we sold in Stowe alone last winter, this was not a decision we made lightly. But, when considering the food system as a whole, the strawberry just isn’t something that should be widely available throughout a Northern Vermont winter, and we decided our menus at ski resorts should paint a more accurate reality.

We hope that one day there’s a solution to our seasonal strawberry conundrum that doesn’t disappoint the strawberry lovers of Pancakia, and we’re hopeful that there is. Our ultimate goal is to effectively bridge the gap between consumer’s wishes and the realities of our seasonal food system. Last year, we were amazed to see how some of our local growers were able to extend the season. We also hold out hope that the local compote we keep stocked in the freezer will become more acceptable on our menus long term. Our northern neighbors in Quebec have been building up their organic strawberry crops, which is a great option during their growing season, and through greenhouses and indoor hydroponics, may one day be able to provide us a reasonably priced organic berry in the winter. But none of these solutions solve the strawberry problem we face today.

A curveball is being thrown next weekend by Vermont’s finest band, Phish, and we are lucky enough to be part of it. Seriously people, SERIOUSLY, we are SO excited about this, it’s just silly.

It all started this spring when we heard rumors of Phish throwing another magical summer festival at Watkins Glen, the giant speedway in upstate New York. So we reached out to their production team to get in on the fun. They got back to us: “Dream big, let’s do this.”

There is the feeling of excited when you’re kind of excited… and then there is a whole other kind of HOLY S#*T THIS IS AWESOME kind of excited that we felt at that moment. So we immediately got to work. We dreamt, we planned, and we collaborated with the best, most creative logistics team we could find. Fast forward to this moment right now, our amazing building team is driving across the great state of New York with 3 huge flatbed trailers full of too many things to describe, which we will be putting together into a 100 seat restaurant complete with shaded hammocks under pergolas, a big beer garden with lawn games and Fiddlehead Brewery suds, as well as a farmer’s market with local organic meats, vegetables and even Jasper Hill Farms cheese.

When we say this has been a long time coming for us, we meen a loooooonnnggg time coming. We here in Pancakia are anything but alone in our love for Phish. I believe Winston Churchill once said something like, “Never before was so much awesome created by so few.” OK, he didn’t say that, but you get the point: love for the good time Phish creates goes way back. In the case of Pancakia, it harkens back to one of our first shows: the world famous New Years’ ‘95 Show at Madison Square Garden. 8 years (and many many shows) later, in our first week of operations as a little cart on Church St, bassist Mike Gordon cruised by on his Segway, bought a crepe, and then (we swear) five minutes later cruised by again and bought another. We’d like to think that Mike’s first bites of Skinny goodness still lingered in his memory nearly twenty years later when we got invited to this festival.

There is at least one thing that we here at the Skinny would like to think we share in common with Phish: they are through-and-through Vermont. They started here, they love it here, and they work together with other Vermonters like Russ Bennett to share their fun wackiness with the whole world (who else remembers the World’s Largest Cowbell Ensemble?).

Fun fact: Phish started playing at Nectars; the first commercial kitchen we ever used was Nectar’s. Burlington had a rich culture and a great music scene before Phish came into the fold, but it is inarguable that their giant cultural contribution is part of why we now punch so far above our weight as a city, both musically and otherwise.

Here’s what we can tell you about next weekend: the surprises will never end and the ridiculousness will never stop. No band could singularly get so many people to come out and keep all of them entertained 24 hours a day. We are lucky to be part of it, and we hope that we can put just a little bit more curve in this year’s curveball. Hope to see you there!

This upcoming Sunday, 4/22 is Earth Day. Every day is Earth Day, as far as we’re concerned, but Sunday really really is ACTUAL Earth Day. In our crepe-addled minds, we believe Earth Day should be one of the biggest holidays of the year. After all, most holidays are just one country’s holiday, or one religion’s holiday, but Earth Day is everyone’s holiday and this beautiful planet of ours really needs some tender loving care.

This Earth Day, we hope you can join us to celebrate and support this one and only planet we have. This year we decided to keep it super local, to a place literally right outside our front door that certainly deserves some attention: the one and only Lake Champlain. This amazingly beautiful body of water is under threat from, among other things, phosphorus, pollution, and surface runoff, and has taken a good 150-year beating from various industrial activities on her shores. Luckily there are some amazing organizations out there trying to help clean up the Lake, and others that help get us out on and around the lake. This Earth Day we’re focusing on the latter.

How does getting us out on Lake Champlain help preserve it? The more people choose to hang out in the lake’s glorious embrace, the more they will come to enjoy it, the more they will care to protect it. This year we have decided to focus our support on 2 organizations that get people out on and around Champ’s waters: Local Motion and The Community Sailing Center. For 4/22, we’re giving away up to $422 to these amazing non-profits that love our Lake: for every $10 donated to these groups, we will donate $4.22!

Here’s a little bit about what they do and how they help the lake:

The Lake Champlain Community Sailing Center: this place is like no other. Most cities have an exclusive country club on their shores, but uur great city has a community center that affordably gets people of all ages and income brackets out onto the lake. They offer summer camps, sailing instruction and racing, paddle boarding, canoeing, kayaking, and yoga. They’ve got “Leader Ship” programs for kids, women’s programs, and adaptive sports programs. Lake Champlain is a gift, and the Community Sailing Center makes sure everyone can take part in unwrapping it. Donate $10 here and we’ll match it with $4.22!

Local Motion: right now, you may be thinking, OK, Mr. Pancake, you said this was a lake-centered thing, Local Motion is a bike-centered thing. Bikes don’t go on lakes. Oooohhh but they do, thanks to the good folks at Local Motion. They run the bike ferry across the gap on the Lake Champlain Causeway, making the crucial connection between the Lake Champlain Islands and the Burlington Bike Path. And this is just one spoke in Local Motion’s proverbial wheel: they are among the most prominent advocates for Bike Path rehabilitation, they help businesses become bike-supportive, they help make our streets safely bike-friendly, and they provide valet bike parking at major events all summer. Donate $10 here and we’ll match it with $4.22.

Combining your love with our love, we’ll raise $1422 for these amazing organizations, $14.22 at a time. Please join us, and from all of us in Pancakia, HAPPY EARTH DAY!

Have you tried these deliciously deep-fried wonders? Hash Purples are made with local beets and carrots, a magical rarity in our Vermont food system as they can be enjoyed and stored year round. Among the most nutritious veggies we grow in VT, beets and carrots also showcase the hard work of Salvation Farms, a non-profit working hard to glean, process, store, and redistribute produce to those who need it most.

Last year they gleaned more than 1700 lbs of beautiful beets in the state of Vermont. So to help support their awesome work, we will donate $1 for every order of Hash Purples to Salvation Farms this spring until we have transformed 25% (425 lbs) of their bounty into our delicious fried purple munchies.

So right now, you’re probably thinking: why would hundreds of pounds of quality local food go unsold? The truth is, fresh, wholesome food stays on farms all of the time—and a lot of it. In the US, it is estimated that 10 MILLION TONS (ReFED report) of food is lost on farms annually and more than 14 MILLION POUNDS (SF study) in Vermont alone.

Farms in Vermont experience a booming lush of harvest every summer and fall – sometimes so overwhelming they run out of time to harvest crops like beets, cabbage, and carrots; or they try to sell into an already saturated market. In addition, some produce is simply not pretty enough for retail shelves, “ugly” produce so to speak. With more than 10% of Vermonters living in food insecure households, Salvation Farms saw all this under utilized bounty as an opportunity for change.

Working with volunteers and training a small team of professionals, this scrappy, hardworking organization based out of Morrisville redistributed nearly 200,000 lbs of not perfect, but perfectly good produce from Vermont farms to consumers in 2017. The team gets down and dirty gleaning on farms and also receives produce from farmers and gleaning programs statewide. In a packroom in Winooski, SF washes, organizes, processes and packs produce to distribute to nutritionally insecure Vermonters, working with organizations such as The Vermont Foodbank and the Chittenden County Department of Corrections.

This little team has already fed thousands of people, saved millions of servings of quality produce from remaining uneaten on farms, and helped develop a talented local food workforce of people who might have otherwise had trouble finding work. All of this has been accomplished by just a 4-person full time team of hard-working visionaries and many, many volunteers. It’s a model for how the country can help feed our citizens, maximize local resources, and support farmers. So, come down to the Skinny Pancake, enjoy some hash purples, and know that $1 of your purchase goes right to a group who will receive every penny of that donation doing amazing work for our environment and our neighbors who need it most.

Yep, we know you love Nutella. Heck, we made about 40,000 crepes with Nutella in 2017 alone…that’s approximately 7207 pounds of gooey chocolate and hazelnut nom-nom goodness.

But there’s a deep, dark secret that y’all may not be aware of: the second ingredient in Nutella is modified palm oil, which is what gives Nutella its silky, spreadable texture. As far as our one and only Planet Earth is concerned: palm oil sucks.

Why? The equivalent of 300 football fields of rainforests are deforested every hour to make way for palm oil plantations and demand is projected to double by 2030 and triple by 2050. Rainforests, on the other hand, are essential to our climate’s health and stability: sucking up climate-change-causing carbon dioxide, providing habitat for more than 10 million species of flora and fauna, and producing more than 20% of our world’s oxygen. There’s no way around it: palm oil is the enemy of the rainforest and Nutella is dependent on palm oil. And while Nutella and its parent company have made efforts to reduce their environmental impact, those words on the ingredient list just never sat easily with us.

If you’re hip to the ways of the Pancake than you know we are on a mission to change the world by building a safer, healthier and more delicious foodshed. So while wildly popular, Nutella has been this unspoken black eye on our mission all along. Surprisingly, we have never gotten a single guest complaint about it. But we knew and we care. So what were we to do? Do we stay loyal to our Nutella-loving guests or remain committed to our mission?

The great Alan Newman solved this riddle for us. You may know Alan as the co-founder of Magic Hat Brewery, Seventh Generation and Gardener’s Supply. Holy moly, right? We asked Alan, “Please, font of wisdom…help us?!?” Ask and ye shall receive: in a transmogrification of Yoda and Gandolf, Alan sniggled, “Make not the mistake in choosing the tyranny of the ‘or’, when the genius of the ‘and’ can be at hand.” Preach on, brother!!! Our Nutella conundrum need not be a binary choice between our values OR our guests! We can pursue our mission AND improve the tastes our guests have come to love.

So, with those words in mind, we set out on a quest of Odyssean proportions. We would find a higher quality, BETTER TASTING, and much more sustainable chocolate hazelnut spread. We were nearly shipwrecked and left for lost several times over…and yet like Ernest Shackleton, we never gave up and eventually found our Elephant Island: this palm oil free chocolate hazelnut spread we now present to you, our eager crepe-eaters.

The second we passed this savior of a spread across our lips, we just…knew. We knew it was better. Richer. Nuttier. Rounder than Nutella….and as smooth as this blog post. And the icing on this “NEWtella” cake: it’s a more sustainable product because it does not depend on Palm Oil. No ingredients destroy the rainforest. And it wasn’t just the palm oil that concerned us about Nutella. Nutella also uses soy lecithin (from GMO soy) and vanillin, which is an artificial vanilla flavor used instead of real vanilla extract. Our new product contains no artificial flavors. This magical goop is better for the planet, better for the body, and better for the taste receptors.

So for all you Nutella fans out there: #SorryNotSorry. We got rid of a product that many of you loved, cherished and some even bathed in….but the earth is grateful, and we think you’ll love this stuff too.

Hi there! On Monday, June 19th our flagship location on the Burlington waterfront turns 10 years old. As we reflect on 10 years of this restaurant, and 14 years in business, we thought we’d share the tale of how we learned to love and source local. We figure we ought to air some dirty laundry in hopes to inspire others that they can do it too.

As of our last audit in October, we source over 70% of our raw and value-added products are locally sourced, but it was not always that way. In fact, when we first opened as a cart on Burlington’s Church Street Marketplace in 2003, exactly 0.0% of our food was sourced locally. Yup, you read that right. We were single source shoppers, and Costco had everything we needed: flour, butter, sugar, salt, vanilla extract, eggs, milk, strawberries, Nutella, ham, shredded cheddar cheese….and the prices were great. We didn’t do much business that first summer. In fact, companywide today, we will do more business in a good hour now than we did that entire year. Even though we sourced from just one location, and even with only a modest amount of business, it was hard. When you’re a one-man show, you do all the showing yourself. You wear all the hats. Sales, service, prep, cooking, accounting, repairs, and maintenance. And if something breaks, there’s no money to throw at the problem…it’s Yankee ingenuity (re: duct tape) followed by time and as a last gasp, money…

That first summer was so tough, in fact, that we rented the business to a friend for the summer of 2004. The cost: buy us a new trailer to replace the one I flipped over while driving our handmade cart to its storage for the winter. Well, thank goodness for that friend, Michael Rimoin, because he saw the light. He had fun out there and managed to nearly double our sales in year two. He had so much fun that he convinced me I had to come back…and thus began the process of long term crepe dreams.

In 2005, the local food movement was starting to heat up, especially in Vermont. We still sourced just about everything from Costco but had enough awareness to go to The Intervale and enjoy Pick Your Own berries from Adam’s Berry Farm one afternoon. We brought a few pints back to our cart and sold them as a novelty. That said, we had FUN! We had some very basic systems and enough sales to modestly pay ourselves that year. The Skinny Pancake’s reputation was growing!

2006 was a big year for local food and for the Skinny Pancake. Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Delima” came out that April and spread like wildfire. That summer, the Skinny Pancake operated out of its first commercial kitchen: Nectar’s was kind enough to share their space with us. With commercial grade mixers, refrigeration, dish machines and more, we were much more efficient. Our fledgeling systems were growing stronger, and actually, legitimate, as was our following of crepe eaters. That year, we became the first ever cart to join the Vermont Fresh Network. We hung their plaque proudly and chased down what local food we could manage. We still shopped at Costco, but we bought King Arthur Flour and local dairy. We made a more regular habit of PYO berries. The experience of being able to source from down the road was incredible.

In 2007, we opened our first brick-and-mortar location at 60 Lake Street on the Burlington waterfront. Our building was LEED-certified. It housed Seventh Generation and Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility. We looked up to our heroes at Ben & Jerry’s and American Flatbread and said, “If they can do it, so can we.” Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy came out that spring, following on the heels of The Omnivore’s Dilemma. We felt inspired and stepped it up. Our local food sourcing increased dramatically to include bacon, apples, whipped cream, honey, tofu, coffee, beer and more. Conspicuously missing, though: most proteins…

Business has a hierarchy of needs. Survival comes first. After making a trip around the sun, we gained confidence…we were saving a smidge of money. In 2008, we took a big, expensive step forward by adding local chicken to the menu. The difference in price between commodity chicken and local chicken is staggering. At five times the price, we watched our food margin fray by nearly 2% from our choice in chicken alone. But we managed it…

Every year since then we have continued to improve our local sourcing one item at a time. When we did our first local food audit in 2009, we were just barely over 50% local. Since then, our local sourcing has increased to upwards of 70%…that’s a 50% increase! In an effort to afford to source more locally, we focused on reducing the costs of our commodity foods. We worked with our teams on controlling their waste. We used every tool in the box, and some laying around outside the box.

As our local sourcing grew, as did our scale, and we discovered new challenges. It was no longer sufficient to just call up our farmers and buy without planning. We began to develop growing contracts that forecasted our demand for the entire season. Contracts allow our farmers to plant reliably without having to spend money on marketing or absorb waste. As a result, we have been able to get better pricing. But buyer beware: when we overcommitted on our basil for our pesto, for example, it led to $1000 in waste as we could not process it fast enough. We can still remember the daunting image of a literal ton of raw basil filling our commissary kitchen. Lessons were learned one at a time. For the pesto, we learned that we needed to move beyond a table top commercial food processor. We needed a large object called a ‘Verticle Chopper Mixer’ to get through it all. That VCM is now vital to our ability to freeze local pesto in season and thaw as needed year round.

Today we estimate that we source about $2,000,000 in local raw and value-added products annually. In order to manage the complex forecasting, contract, and communication process, we hired a full-time Local Food Coordinator, a recent UVM Food Systems Major graduate. We have picked the “low hanging fruit” in the local foodshed…and most of the middle hanging fruit too. There are still some elusive local foods that we just can not afford or can not get at scale. But we’re always working on it.

Hopefully the moral of this story is clear…but just in case, we’ll spell it out for you: ‘going local’ is a journey, not a destination. And it takes one foot in front of the other to get anywhere with it. If you’re an aspiring food entrepreneur intimidated by local sourcing, just take it one step at a time. You’ll get there.

Today, April 22 2017, is Earth Day and we’re celebrating with crayons. That’s right…drop by any of our locations and color in one these awesome “I love earth” pages any day this week. For each one that’s completed, we will donate $4.22 to 1% For the Planet. You don’t even have to color between the lines!

Earth Day carries more gravity this year than ever before, which is why we’re making this effort to call attention to it. With the March for Science happening today and the People’s Climate March next week, this week is a watershed moment for modern day environmentalism. Across the country and world, millions of global citizens will stand up for scientific truth and for the principals of conserving and appreciating the only planet we have.

There is no doubt that so much activism at once is driven by a grave threat: climate change, and the deniers of it who are currently in power. These politicians are ignoring established scientific theory, undermining our environmental institutions, destroying data that tracks environmental changes, and injecting politics into an arena it has no business in.

The Skinny Pancake rallies around an environmental mission “to change the world by creating a safer, healthier and more delicious food shed.” We do not have a mission to take political stands. We want to welcome all walks of life as guests to enjoy the Skinny Pancake.

But wait, isn’t this a political statement, and shouldn’t we shy away from it? No. Our fervent belief is that love of our planet and heeding established science should not be a political position, so we will not treat it that way. Historically, environmentalism used to be a bipartisan issue, and we want to do our part to reunite around it. Earth Day was created by a Republican Congressman Pete McLoskey and a Democratic Senator Gaylord Nelson. The EPA was created by Republican President Richard Nixon and strengthened by Republican President George H.W. Bush. Both of them, and many other Republicans of yore, spoke compellingly about the need to protect our environment.

Loving our planet is a shared goal that all of us can rally around. Inaction only accelerates the incoming tide. As David Titley, Director of the Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate at Pennsylvania State University, explained, “The atmosphere doesn’t care what any single person believes. It’s just going to keep getting warmer, and the climate’s going to change as long as we keep increasing the amount of greenhouse gasses.”

The scientific consensus is clear: climate change is human-caused, dire consequences are potentially around the corner, and our current trajectory must change immediately. The the best way out of the predicament is international accord to move toward cleaner fuels, efficiency in construction and transportation, better urban planning, food production, waste management, and more. The technology to solve this problem already exists and will only improve. The will to address it exists, especially if the United States would lead the way. If human ingenuity could create the industrial revolution, the Internet, and put a man on the moon, we can band together and clean up our atmosphere. All it takes is action, today and every day going forward.

One doesn’t forget the first time they witness the female powerhouse that is Steady Betty. For me, it was the Magic Hat Mardi Gras party in 2016 (Just a year ago? Sinful, I know). Kicking off that weekend by dancing to the 8-piece rocksteady band of all women is one heck of a way to kick off the annual March celebration. And as we welcome the ladies back to our Skinny Pancake Burlington stage this week, let’s dive a bit deeper into this crew.

Steady Betty has a hold over the Burlington area. From early sets at Radio Bean to bigger stages at Nectar’s and Higher Ground, to big outdoor shows at Grand Point North and Waking Windows. From the first minute the stew of bass, drums, and horns hit your ears, the aural impact works its way to your toes, and soon thereafter into a full on groove. Their reggae infused with dance and funk can get anyone on their feet – you see this from their long-time fans and first-time listeners alike.

While many folks originally associated Steady Betty with their early champion and occasional participant, Kat Wright, the roster of talent in this crew runs deep. With sound tech extraordinaire, Rachel Capobianco (who’s spent some time on the road with Mike Gordon), the incredible pipes of Mariam Bernardo (with her own album in the works), exceptional rocksteady guitar playing from Linda Bassick (of a weekly Radio Bean kids show among other projects), and an absolutely kick-ass collection of horns players – it’s very easy to throw the work SuperGroup at this collective.

Coming up with a variety of pieces with so many influences only makes the creative process that much more intriguing. Rocksteady inspiration comes from Dawn Penn, Judy Mowat and Phyllis Dillon. Linda Bassik sources support from other female musicians as an influence of encouragement and growth during her time with Steady Betty over the last five years. “I feel freer in my musical expression than I ever have before.”

So how would one support females artists here in Vermont? First off, don’t make any assumptions. “Don’t limit girls wanting to play instruments by telling them certain ones are for boys are certain ones are for girls,” says Bassik. Being inclusive just the beginning. Involvement in the Burlington area comes easy when there are so many fantastic venues around. Volunteering time at the Flynn or Higher Ground, or you can spend some time with the artists themselves – you can find many of them hanging out on any given night enjoying another local musician’s show.

Supporting organizations like Girls Rock Vermont is one way Steady Betty influences younger females with an interest in music. One of the Girls Rock mottos is “we build each other up” which is exactly what women must do. No judgment, no comparisons. Linda explains “contrary to what our culture is telling you, there can be more than one female in a band! And she doesn’t have to be the singer!” So come support these fantastically badass females Friday, March 24th!

Band:

Linda Bassick – Guitar & Vocals

Miriam Bernardo – Vocals

Rachel Capobianco – Drums & Vocals

Caroline O’Connor – Bass

Zoe Harris – Alto Sax

Margot VanHorne – Trumpet

Allison Frazier – Baritone Sax

Megan Waterhouse – Tenor SaxSometimes Kat Wright on vocals (when she is not busy with her band!)

Feeling the Bern with House Made Hot Sauce

Burlington, VT – For a restaurant that sources over 70% of its ingredients locally, according to their latest local food audit, perhaps it’s no surprise the Skinny Pancake recently started making their own locally-sourced hot sauce to go alongside their mouth-watering crêpes, paninis, sides, and more…

With a combination of local habañero, anaheim, hungarian, and wax peppers, plus an homage paid to former Burlington mayor and current Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, the Skinny Pancake’s Curtis Garrow has created a community-building, crowd-pleasing hot sauce that will leave you “feeling the Bern” no matter your political views.

The Birth of “Bern Baby Bern”

Call it an “aha” moment, call it eureka, but when Curtis Garrow stared down at the list of produce offerings in an e-mail sent from Pomykala Farm while ordering produce for the Skinny just a few weeks ago, he knew a house-made, locally-sourced hot sauce simply had to happen. Paying tribute to Bernie Sanders, the “Bern Baby Bern” hot sauce exudes the hometown pride, local resilience, and sticking-it-to-the-man attitude that Bernie himself believes in, which has endeared voters of all political parties nationwide.

In case you’re wondering what it’s like to “feel the Bern,” the “Bern Baby Bern” hot sauce has a medium kick with deep sweet notes to round out the spice from the mix of peppers Curtis uses. If you’ve got the guts, he has also created the “Green Monster,” which is rated EXTREMELY hot on the bottle, using green habañero chilis with a little bit of single-source pure Vermont maple syrup for sweetness.

The Skinny Pancake is renowned for its partnerships with local farms and for its work in building a stronger local foodshed across the state of Vermont. So why not use the now apparently vast array of Vermont-grown hot peppers available for a hot sauce?

Like a beautiful piece of artwork, a map of Vermont featuring plaques with the names and locations of all of the Skinny Pancake’s local purveyors adorn the western-facing wall of the Burlington restaurant, drawing the attention of locals and tourists alike.

Overhearing conversations from onlookers of this foodshed spectacle, one thing is unequivocally clear: people are increasingly wondering about and wanting to know where their food comes from.

And that’s something Curtis, and the Skinny Pancake, couldn’t be happier about.

Strengthening Local Foodsheds

As a born-and-raised Vermonter, sharing his love for the local foodshed by working with local farmers simply made good sense: “Seeing farming in an everyday sense,” Curtis told me, “these people dedicating their lives to what they do… What better way to give back than by purchasing local goods from local people that you know? We’re keeping the money local, and bringing their name into the bigger picture.”

In layman’s terms, what this means is that your salad greens now come with a name and a face–and that’s something to be cherished for more reasons than one. As members of 1% for the Planet, the Skinny Pancake is committed to the triple bottom line: People, Planet, and a Profit donating 1% of their annual sales to local non-profits, in addition to their care and respect for farmers and the working landscape.

Last summer, I had the incredible opportunity to see, first-hand, the importance of the relationships built between farmers and restaurants like the Skinny Pancake during a working membership at Good Heart Farmstead, one of the Skinny Pancake’s local purveyors (which also happens to be run by a friend of mine from college).

On my hands and knees, in the compost-rich, organic soil, I began clipping lettuce greens, thinking about where they might be headed, and who the lucky end consumer of this fresh and crispy lettuce would be.

“Where’s all this gloriousness headed to?” I asked from a few rows away.

“Oh! That? That’s headed to the Skinny Pancake in Montpelier,” Edge, Good Heart Farmstead’s co-owner, told me. “Once you’re done, can you go down and give it a rinse?”

Washing the beautiful greens that go in the Skinny Pancake’s salads and accompany their crêpes was somewhat of a religious experience for me. As I was lifting them in and out of the water, I was imagining them perfectly dressed in the Skinny’s famous maple-pesto vinaigrette, sitting directly next to a Johnny crêpe, which features locally-raised pulled pork with caramelized onions and a VT maple-barbeque sauce, or a Josh Panda crêpe, “fried Misty Knoll chicken tenders with shredded potatoes wrapped in a cornmeal crepe and smothered in sausage gravy,” two of my all-time favorites the Skinny Pancake offers.

Being so close to the source, and knowing the greens’ final destination, was unlike anything I had ever been a part of before.

“How are those greens coming, Alex?” Edge yelled from across the farm. Time to focus…

But I couldn’t stop thinking.

“They have a reliable source of greens? And the Skinny Pancake reliably needs greens?” Perfect. Incredible!

“Match made in heaven,” I thought.

And it was.

Seeing Edge hop in his truck and head just 15 miles to Montpelier with the 50 lbs of lettuce we had just harvested was nothing short of magical.

From hot sauce to greens, it’s clear that every ingredient counts when the goal is to support as many local producers as possible. Without the pure dedication and big hearts of local farmers who make the abundance of local ingredients available, and the restaurants like the Skinny Pancake who purchase them and help farmers generate a steadier income, there would be no locally-made hot sauce to be had, or maple-y-pesto-y greens to enjoy on a chilly winter’s day.